10 Social Media Plugins for your WordPress Blog

With the increase in bloggers using WordPress over the last couple years combined with the increase in the use of social media, one of the most frequent questions blog owners have is how to bring the two together.

You’ve heard the stories about bloggers that use twitter, facebook, stumbeupon or digg to generate daily traffic in the thousands or tens of thousands. And now you want to know… “How do I get me some of that social media love?”

Here are 10 of the best social media plugins for WordPress.

1. Social Media Page. The social media craze has caused blogs and websites to look for ways to grow their network, and there’s no easier way to do this then with Social Media Page. This application lets you add buttons to posts or pages, so that  users can click on the buttons to go to your profile on different social media sites. With buttons for over 100 social media sites, you should be well-covered for any and all of your networks.

2. Twitter Tools. This plugin offers a variety of features,  integrating your Twitter updates into your blog, making it easy to create blog posts from your tweets. Other features include creating a weekly digest of updates, auto update of your Twitter updates when a new blog post is published and archived tweets.

3. Digg This. If you’re “dugg” in on Digg, then you’ll definitely want to add this to your blog. This feature encourages visitors to digg your posts and then tells you how many people have dugg it.

4. Photo Dropper. It can sometimes be tough adding photos to your blog because of licenses, however, Photo Dropper makes it much easier by searching and adding Flickr photos to your posts that have been Creative Commons licensed.

5. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button. Everyone loves submitting their posts to different social networking and bookmarking sites to gain exposure and increase page views, but it makes it easier when your visitors start submitting your posts, which is where this plugin comes in. Visitors can choose from over 100 social media sites to submit your posts to.

6. WP-Gravatar. Add a face to your commenters by letting them add an avatar to their posts.

7. Tweetmeme. Increase your exposure and page views with this button that lets visitors tweet your blog post with one click.

8. Stumble Reviews. After you’ve gotten a strong following on your blog and are getting good feedback, you can add this application to put comments and reviews on each blog post of what others have said about it on StumbleUpon.

9. Twitter Updater. Automatically sends new blog posts to your Twitter page and shortens the link to a TinyURL.

10. Social Traffic Monitor. This is a great tool for monitoring which social media outlets your traffic is coming from.